15
The British Army in Training
\i4th February^ 1940]
Infantry
o
ne of England's great strengths is that when
she changes her methods, she does so within
the old frameworks. Thus it is that she is a
democracy within a monarchy: that her physicists
win the Nobel prize from mediaeval universities:
that having adopted conscription, for her a revolu-
tionary decision, she enlists and trains her young
soldiers in the old regiments which made up the
former British Army. The Guards, the Warwicks,
the Gordons, the Camerons, and fifty others will
each have, if need be, ten or fifteen battalions. And
so the youngsters of the new army will inherit the
glorious traditions of the old.
There is, for instance, a training camp organized
under the aegis of one of England's oldest and most
famous regiments, the Queen's. Two thousand
recruits are learning their jobs there. Amidst what
two months ago was a vague, indeterminate
countryside, comfortable, well-heated hutments have
sprung up: outside them, impeccable lines of kit. All
over the frozen fields, the platoons are at work.
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